British Patent No. 2258776 discloses an antenna which has a three-dimensional antenna element structure by virtue of having a plurality of helical elements arranged around a common axis. Such an antenna is particularly useful for receiving signals from satellites, for example, in a GPS (global positioning system) receiver arrangement. The antenna is capable of receiving circularly polarised signals from sources which may be directly above the antenna, i.e. on its axis, or at a location a few degrees above a plane perpendicular to the antenna axis and passing through the antenna, or from sources located anywhere in the solid angle between these extremes.
While being intended mainly for reception of circularly polarised signals, such an antenna, due to its three-dimensional structure, is also suitable as an omnidirectional antenna for receiving vertically and horizontally polarised signals.
One of the disadvantages of such an antenna is that in certain applications it is insufficiently robust, and cannot easily be modified to overcome this difficulty without a performance penalty. For this reason, antennas which are to receive signals from the sky in harsh environments, such as on the outside of an aircraft fuselage, are often patch antennas, being simply plates (generally plated metallic square patches) of conductive material mounted flush on an insulated surface which may be part of the aircraft fuselage. However, patch antennas tend to have poor gain at low angles of elevation. Efforts to overcome this disadvantage have included using a plurality of differently oriented patch antennas feeding a single receiver. This technique is expensive, not only due to the numbers of elements required, but also due to the difficulty of combining the received signals.